Routine

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Monday, January 5, 2015

Dictionary
routine |roōˈtēn|
noun
a sequence of actions regularly followed; a fixed program : I settled down into a routine of work and sleep | as a matter of routine a report will be sent to the director.
• a set sequence in a performance such as a dance or comedy act : he was trying to persuade her to have a tap routine in the play.
• Computing a sequence of instructions for performing a task that forms a program or a distinct part of one.
adjective
performed as part of a regular procedure rather than for a special reason : the principal insisted that this was just a routine annual drill.
• monotonous or tedious : we are set in our dull routine existence.
verb [ trans. ] rare
organize according to a routine : all had been routined with smoothness.
DERIVATIVES
routinely adverb
ORIGIN late 17th cent.(denoting a regular course or procedure): from French, from route ‘road’ (see route ).

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Thanks for this inquiry, which is indeed relevant to our conversation.

Lacan
is slippery as we know, so to some extent my account is heuretic and
not scholarly, meaning that my reading is in the interests of
grammatology and framed by apparatus theory. In that context, by
definition, the digital apparatus emerges from but is not confined to
the accomplishments and limitations of the previous apparatus. Electracy has its own limits but that is not our concern now.
A key to the "optimistic" attitude towards psychoanalysis as ontology
for electracy is the provenance of gaze out of existential
phenomenology, specifically Merleau-Ponty (and Sartre). You and I
talked a bit about "Flesh" and Lacan's references to M-P's Visible and
Invisible, pubished posthumously just at the time of Seminar XI. M-P
argued explicitly that his account was ontological, replacing conceptual
or literate "substance" with "element" in the classical sense of earth
air fire water. He overcame cartesian dualism with Flesh, to name the
human as within the world in our materiality and sensorium: we see from
one position and are looked at from everywhere. What attracted me most
to M-P is the relevance of his ontology for electracy, in that he
insisted that the metaphysics of Flesh exceed the reach of linguistics
and language, of discourse (literate metaphysics), so he turned to
painters, especially Cezanne, and then Paul Klee, whose works
"authored" so to speak versions of Flesh as ontology. As we discussed,
Proust was his (and nearly everyone else's, include Deleuze later)
prototype or touchstone, referring to his involuntary memory. But he
noted that Proust in his novel is composing a hybrid philosophy, and not
working directly with Flesh.

The consistency of M-P's claim is measured relative to Heidegger,
for example, who reminded us that Being appears in and is possible for
thought only in writing (just as Lacan observed that the Unconscious
appears only in Analytic therapy). The related point from an earlier
lecture is that the purpose of therapy is to bring the excluded Real
into representation, in order to relieve the suffering you mentioned:
to transform suffering into symptom, as Freud said (into ordinary
unhappiness). We noted in our readings (and my lecture) that Lacan
describes a register of drive now accessible that is beyond the pleasure
principle. There are two pleasures (as Barthes noted in Pleasure of
the Text also: pleasure and bliss). The apparatus argument is that
the tracking of the two pleasures is a map of the discovery or emergence
of electracy out of literacy. The Symbolic (and Imaginary) orders are
covered by literacy, the operations of language and discourse, the
defile of the signifier, alienation (in short). That is indeed the locus
of the other provoking the emergence of the subject. The desire of the
other.

There is another order, the Real, excluded (until now) from
discourse, from appearance, from consciousness, withdrawn completely.
Here is the workings of @ (objet petite a), partial objects, circulating
around the void, the hole of lack, the Nothing, the gap between need
and demand. The interest of Seminar XI for us is the account of gaze as
one of the partial objects, and how it may be brought into
representation, at least as image, but in principle in any aesthetic
procution.

What is confusing and important to clarify (to the extent
possible) is that the @ proper is nothing in itself, but is only a
relation for the libido, the lamella of erogenous zones: the part
objects are the objects cause of desire (as you know), and any
particular item or "thing" that is desired, any "object" in the literate
sense, is an ambassador for the object cause. The drive and the @ are
best considered together (in fact we are aware by now of the
interdependence of the 4 fundamental concepts in general and all the
subfeatures articulated in the lectures to explain them). The drive
includes four operations (source, impetus, object, aim... something like
that?). These four correlate fairly well with Aristotle's four
causes: material, efficient, formal, final. What interests Lacan early in the seminar is to explain the
Unconscious as the "unrealized" dimension of Limbo between potential and
actual: what interrupts living?

So
in class on Wednesday we will discuss how or in what way the camera and the various
practices of photography invented in the arts and popular culture
support and enable an ontology of the Real in Lacan sense. Your
spotlight is an excellent test case, but to direct the poetics and its
test in an experiment, we will want to correlate the CATTt inventories
with some clarity.

"Fetish" is a good anchor for gathering the
CATTt. It is useful even at the basic level of heuretics proper,
reminding us to pay attention to terminology. Psychoanalysis, like any
inventive methodology, dealt with the challenge of naming its new areas
of inquiry by appropriating some existing vocabulary. This vocabulary
is catachrestic, meaning that it is a figure for something that does not
have a literal sense. If we keep in mind the original source of
"fetish" we recognize that the term is eloquent, even if Freud used it
pejoratively to some extent. I discuss this in Internet
Invention (Marx and Freud both using fetish negatively to name features
of the industrial city, versus artists who somewhat later used it
positively). It concerns promoting some ordinary item of everyday life
to a position of symbolic power.

"Castration" is similarly evocative: a
source of much misunderstanding of course, but also eloquent in naming a
condition of limit, disempowerment, control, threat--and reminds us of stakes in desidero. The most relevant
thing for us in the discussion is the description of operations and
logics associated with fetish and castration. You picked up on the
practical value of Metz's conversation. He is drawing upon Lacan of
course, applying Lacan and psychoanalysis in general to cinema. He is
using the theory to articulate the match between theory and practice
that concerns us also: that there are features of the camera and
photography that correlate with the theoretical account of human primary
process (the Unconscious).

We need cameras to write with or through the
Unconscious so to speak. For example, the logic of fetishism in the
psychoanalytic context is that of denial, disavowal (defense)--the
child's denial of sexual difference. This scene must be generalized to
the logic, which persists in adult experience, allowing a person to
maintain two conflicting positions simultaneously: "I know, but all the
same" (or, the translation I prefer, "I know, but still..."). I know
(= science); but still (= belief). These two version of reality are on
different planes. We have to assume in the context of grammatology that
there is a use value for this operation of primary process. The
"still" has choral functionality (it is conductive).

A good way to situate your deferred
participation in the email back-channel conversation about process.
One's first impression of a week's email could easily be that there is
no pattern or tendency, in that each post picks up on a
different piece of the elephant, so to speak, and then the response may or
may not get around to reminding all that we are talking about a camel (?).
Your primer is a reminder of this gee and haw dimension of the
exchange. The first point always is just regarding heuretics, the logic
of invention, and the CATTt , its chief heuristic. We are indeed
appropriating Lacan rather than attempting to be scholars of
psychoanalysis (and certainly not wanting to be clinicians of
neuroses). Nor are we repurposing him entirely either, of course, since
the proviso is that he is describing a Real for our metaphysics, whose
ontology we intend to test and explore in our experiments.

Next step
then is to come to some agreement about what the theory has to offer,
and it would be good to be more or less on the same page about this, the
same screen, even though each experiment can and should be specific and
partial (necessarily), and all the better for it, since an apparatus is
not invented in a day by a solipsist. We left off the week you missed
(for a very good reason) with a clear (hopefully) statement of what we
needed to get from Lacan: an idea central to the theory about the
nature and operation of the Unconscious + an example or collection of
examples helping locate how the Real of the theory is manifested in
experience, such that we might be able to work with it in our own
projects (returning to the Wide Image).

This past week the concluding
lecture, following a productive and creative Band, clarified our
purpose, as extracting or extrapolating a pedagogy for general electracy
from the procedures of psychoanalytic training analysis, considered as a
transitional practice moving from literacy to the new apparatus (from
medicine, even from science, to something else, concerning how to enjoy.

A wonderful post (worth waiting for!).
You have the feel for Lacanian style (and its Chinese cousin) in working
through a theoretical issue by means of an art (or other materialized)
example. Potentiality is the central issue as we know, with the
Unconscious located in an interval gap of Limbo between Potential and
Actual (central and fundamental theme of metaphysics). Relevant to the
lessons of your case example is Lacan's description of the Unconscious
as an alternating current, or as a fish net that opens and closes, a
"trap" in this respect, whose rhythms one must learn to notice. In his
famous talk given at the Johns Hopkins Symposium that kicked off
poststructuralism in America, Lacan evoked the Unconscious as a figure,
as Baltimore in the early morning, before sunrise, with the neon lights
of the city blinking on and off. I appropriated that image to develop a
version of conduction that I characterized as reasoneon.

We may
recognize the Tai Chi symbol referencing the alternating rhythm of
yin-yang, closed and broken lines stacking up into sets of 6, a hexagram
as two trigrams, moments of time flowing constantly, frame grabs of
process, positions as we know--of Shi. It is the 0/1 F/T off/on switch
constitutive of computing (the invention streams converging). Leibniz
who developed the binomial number system was shocked when he learned
about the I Ching from a Jesuit friend returning from mission work in
China. He saw that the 64 hexagram configured the first 64 numbers in a
binomial system. Finally, Lacan made the connection with Electracy
explicit when he explained this operation of the Unconscious with
reference to electricity itself, and the physics of an electric light
(having to do with the properties of current).

But all of that , as in your case also, is to understand this
Real, known as the Unconscious, in order to be able to live with it and
thrive in that rhythm.

This post, too, remains connected with the
spirit as well as the letter (!) of the seminar. To the extent that
familiarity with context promotes understanding, it is useful to orient
the path Lacan has charted for himself by noting its emergence out of
existential phenomenology -- not only Heidegger, but also Merleau-Ponty
and Sartre (as we discussed). As you know from Avatar Emergency, early
Sartre -- Nausea and Being and Nothingness-- is important for my
approach to French theory. Sartre learns (ruefully) that being and
meaning (as Lacan termed it) are irreducibly split and may not be
synthesized syncretized or any other version of completeness. The
absolute is impossible, or, it is the Real. Sartre declares, after
numerous failed attempts, that one must either live, or tell, they
don't happen together. One has the cake, or eats it, perhaps.
Benjamin's terms were Erlebnis (living) and Erfahrung (telling). Now as
I said it seems that Lacan agrees and shows why it is so, and his
situating of what resists the absolute as the male/female division makes
his case all the more convincing. Nonetheless, he also indicates that a
characteristic of the human is striving for completion. Advertisers
have mastered the showing of completion that provokes the evil eye
and whose nature was recognized in Christianity as Mary with Baby Jesus
(except she should be nursing for it to be precise).

This striving is life (being), Aristotle's Entelechy, Leibniz's
Monad, Spinoza's Conatus, Heidegger's Dasein. What prevents well-being
(is it a fatal resistance?) is that this striving is captured, trapped
in the gaze. This aphanisis, this coming and going, place and
temporality of the Unconscious, of the Subject in its split, its
dimensions of meaning or being, that is the issue. The "or" is the vel (Latin or), in Lacan's updating of Tuché, the choice of decision.
So it is evident that numerous motifs are wrapped up in the topic you
pose. What we need to sort out, perhaps in the band, is that there are
two pleasures, two vectors or dynamics, in the circulation of drive.
Everything is interrelated in Lacan's model (the Borromean knot, the R S
I rings), but perhaps we may risk a simplification justified in our
context, by saying that literacy ontologized meaning in the register of
the Symbolic via the (semiotic) signifier. That is the way of
alienation. The other way is opened through the other beginning,
passage through the Real, littered with part objects (letters), whose
writing becomes possible in the digital apparatus, by means of a camera. This way becomes Sinthome (in late Lacan), when Lacan apprenticed himself to the littoral litter of Finnegans Wake (Joy/ce).

Here is the Adam-theorist as ordered by master
ulmer! There was nothing "wrong" in itself with the jazz reference
last week, except that it was an interpretation treating Lacan as
object of study when heuretics (game that it is) requires us to treat
him as method of study. He tells us what to do, not vice versa
(although like the good courtier or the Chinese sage we also manipulate
our resources to suit our invention). You get a lot of value out of
this example, nicely and explicitly supporting an important aspect of
the theory. We know from the Lacan's (local) Contrast that Freud is the
anti-Descartes. The interesting point for the new dimension of
electracy (supplementing the introspective consciousness of literacy) is
to describe what happens beyond the cogito (I think, therefore, I am),
that is, when you include the body (which Descartes abjected as mere
meat, with dire consequences, according to many). The Unconscious (as
Jacob observed) turns out not to be "ours," or in us -- or rather, the
map of our positioning relative to the unconscious is a moebius strip, a
topological figure showing us that the Unconscious functions as an
"edge." It is the edge of inside/outside, with effects Lacan
characterized as "extimacy."

Your poem gives a more elegant variation on
Freud's alternative cogito (the desidero), "I think where I am not,
and am not where I think." This aniti-cogito takes into account the
split Subject. That the subject is split within (the split is not
subject-object, or me in here vs the world out there, but I/me/other). The
gaze is a field theory of Subject (bringing psychology into line with
the other sciences shifting from reference to field relationality of
system networks). The point is central to electracy regarding added
value for Google Glass: we need not only GPS, but EPS -- existential
positioning system. The split between meaning and being is involved,
and what we want to learn from Lacan is how to gather all our informing
parts (this gathering we have rightly identified as montage of a
surrealist collage sort for example). Lacan works hard to help us,
suggesting one way to characterize our experiment, as learning how to
locate and triangulate to take into account the position from which we
are regarded, as well as and along with the position from which we
look. Note the "French" term: regard.

What is "Routine"?

Gregory L. Ulmer is Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville FL. He is coordinator of the Florida Research Ensemble. The purpose of this blog is to develop and test the equivalent of a metaphysics for the digital apparatus: electracy.